Maintaining A Minority Language: A Case Study of Hispanic Teenagers.
John Gibbons and Elizabeth Ramirez. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual
Matters, 2004. Pp. x + 240. £25.95 paper.
On reading the title of this volume, the reader might assume that the
study involves teenagers in a large urban area of the United States.
Potential readers will be surprised to realize that this book is about
Hispanic teenagers in Sydney, Australia, and the efforts of these teens
and their families to maintain their Spanish language. The authors,
Gibbons and Ramirez, argue that the understanding of minority language
maintenance and shift “requires the examination of the degree of
acquisition of various elements of proficiency, including spoken language,
basic literacy skills, grammar and high register” (p. l). Thus,
having set a rather rigorous benchmark for themselves, they proceed to
study 106 Hispanic teenagers to determine the degree of maintenance of
Spanish among them as well as their attitudes toward their
bilingualism.